List: What Mandy Loves About Writing

This past year has been the driest spell of "novel writing" since middle school.  I've always been one to tweak whatever story I had come up on the daily.  I'd knock out at least hundreds of words in a week no matter what I'm doing, even if I knew it was bad and nobody would ever see it but me.  Lately, I've been drained from my day job where any computer time including blogging and novel writing is not as easy for me to turn to for enjoyment as it once was.   But my motivation!  Where did you go?

Maybe I'll find a bit of it after listing out what I love about writing below:

• Imagination running wild.  With the stories, I'm playing God in my own little world.  My characters, scenes, and plots all come from and star in my head where I turn to whenever I want.  With blogging, the planning of topics and how / what to say for each week or month is almost more fun than the writing itself.  It's all a blog for me where I control what goes live and what gets cut.

• The escapism of it all.  I thrive on control.  Having a story all to myself that nobody knows the plot line or what the characters will do next or where it's going but me until I say boo is SO THRILLING in its own little way.  It's my little nugget of knowledge until I want the world to have their own version of it mined from their brains.

• There's a community for everyone.  It can be genre-based on outlet based (travel, food blogging, etc), but there is bound to be a group out there who likes / writes the same type of stuff you do.  Feed off of them or just sit in the same room quietly with them; either way there's that community for ya.

• Inspiration is everywhere.  I have found character and storyline ideas all over the place from train rides to birthday parties to the color I wore that day and everything in between.  I wish people watching was a sport because I'm at Olympic-level when I have to be outside with others.

• Duh, you can make money off of it / make a career out of it.  I'll get to this little bit eventually, hopefully, maybe someday, or whatever.  I'm just happy to hobby-it-out currently until I have a greater reason to not take that risk away from my comfortable life right now.  Paying off student loans is best to do before jumping into your probably-dirt-poor dreams.

(Psst: Speaking of writing, I have a whole word-based masterpiece on another blog called What Mandy Thinks you should know about if you don't already.  I also have a guest spot on Never What You Think, a friend's blog covering a variety of topics.)